Friday, August 21, 2015

Memo to Trump:You are just what we do not need, another vacuous bully on the international stage

Those eleven million undocumented immigrants, they're outta here the first week I'm in office!

I will build the biggest wall you’ve ever seen
between Mexico and the United States, and make the Mexicans pay for it!

Bomb the ISIS oil fields!

Jeb Bush’s crowd down the street, do you know what
they are doing....they are sleeping, sleeping sleeping? There is no energy
there!

Mexicans are bad people, perhaps a few are even good
people, but there are rapists and bad people coming into our country and they
have to be stopped!

Hillary is by far the worst Secretary of State in
our nation’s history and she could be in so much trouble that sh may not be
able to finish her run for the presidency...If General Petraeus, someone
everyone liked and respected is destroyed by much less (wrongdoing), how could
she not deserve a similar treatment? She might well have to spend time in a
cell, not the White House!

All of the other candidates are losers!!

These are just some of the radioactive political
statements by the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination for
the president of the United States.

The Donald also, evocative of Hitler’s entrance into
Berlin at the opening of Reni Reifenstahl’s propaganda file, Triumph of the
Will, in his bi-plane casting a huge shadow on the buildings from the sun,
drops out of the sky at the Iowa State Fair, in his own helicopter, blazing his
name in large letters on the side of the plane.....and having cauvght
everyone’s attention, including the national media cameras, immediately offers
free rides to the waiting children...as if any of them would not jump at the
chance of a free helicopter ride at the State Fair!

Eugene Robinson writes a piece today in Truthdig.com
asking the rhetorical question, “Can anyone out-Trump Trump?” Detailing the
respective tactics of his opponents to Trump’s style and statements, Robinson
is beginning to wonder if this nuclear campaign can or will be stopped. Up
until now, most political observers believed sincerely that Trump would
flame-out on his own sword, and for his opponents, their initial strategy was
to let that happen, without raising a syllable in protest, Only Marco Rubio,
taking the high road, and Ted Cruze, sidling up to The Donald are now keeping
their powder dry in taking him on. Even Jeb Bush is plaintively crying ‘foul’
over his decade long flirtation with the Democrats, compared with Bush’s career
as abonafide conservative.

As history and the political gods would have it,
former President Jimmy Carter, yesterday announced that in addition to the
cancerous tumor that has been removed from his liver, he has been told that
there are now four cancerous lesions on his brain. Political pundits,
especially on MSNBC, decry his having suffered an imposed reputation as a weak
man, since his defeat by the hawkish Ronald Reagan. It is not incidental to
note the for the last eight years, the Republicans have painted President Obama
with the samje brush and colour they used on Carter. (This space has already
been dedicated to the thesis that American presidential elections in 2000 and
2004 were each a referendum on masculinity, not on nuanced debates over
policy.) In 2008, Obama presented the voters with a very different choice,
especially when compared with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton who
voted for the Iraq war in 2003, and also when compared with his Republican
opponent, John McCain, infamous for his “bomb bomb Iran” imitation of the Beach
Boys pop music.

The American people are not only frustrated over the
massive job loss to Asia, and the inconclusive results of both the Afghanistan
and Iraq wars, as well as the Mexican stand-off in Ukraine with Putin. And then
there is the seemingly interminable conflict with ISIS, with their be-headings
(most recently of an antiquities scholar in Palmyra) and their massive
slaughter of infidels, a conflict that no authority or agency really has an
proposal to terminate (all the while uttering words like “degrade” and
“destroy”).

Posturing as the real answer to Putin’s bravado, to
Kim Jung Un’s sabre-rattling, to the Congressional stalemate over immigration,
to the funding of ISIS through black-market sale of oil from fields they
control, while name-calling his political opponents in both parties, (as if he
were in a high school election for student council president) bragging about
how rich he is and that he is only doing this (campaign) to “make American
great again”...these features may offer the country an illicit, but not banned
drug for their political obsession, their pain and the shame and embarrassment
of appearing weak, but the power-drug cannot provide more than a brief, if
dramatic and unconventional reprise from the obstructionism and paralysis in
Washington. Manufactured in the television and advertising/marketing/public
relations offices on Madison Avenue, disdainful of and devoid of all
thoughtful, researched and debated public policy options, Trump is becoming
what Margaret Atwood hated, a “thing” (after the fame she achieved through her
writing), although all reports that outline his performances on the stump and
in the television studios shout out his “real” and independent humanity,
without the programming that is imprinted into and sabotaging most political
candidates today.

The ironies abound. His vacuity of feasible policy
options is overlooked and submerged by his bombastic magnetism; his wealth
belies his poverty of political acumen, except as salesman. If Putin can and
will remain in power through duplicitous deception of the Russian people,
controlling as he does, the national media in that country, then how different
is Trump really, given the sycophant reporters and talking heads who hang on
his every word. Trump blatantly and caustically insults a female reporter for
asking “rude” questions and then panders to the owner of the Fox network where
she works and everything is smoothed (or smoozed) over. Fox knows a thing or
two about ratings and although they expected some 2 million viewers for the
first Republican debate, on their network, the viewing audience numbered 24
million. And they were glued to their television sets to see or listen to Jeb
Bush, or any of the other candidates, non-entities in Trump’s mind and
vernacular.

An instructor in another life reminded the class
that there were two kinds of people: givers and takers. And conflicts arise
when the givers, realizing how they are being taken advantage of, stop giving.
It would seem that the duality of politics in the United States, could be seen
through a lens marked “fighters” and negotiators...and the former are more to
the liking of a majority of the voters. Hence, Hillary’s “I will fight for the
middle class” sell line for her campaign. Bernie Sanders, too, is attempting to
generate a revolution, fighting the financial interests of Wall Street, and the
politicians whose votes have been bought by the barons of wealth, for the
preservation of their narrow interests. President Jimmy Carter wistfully longed
to have sent an additional helicopter to rescue the hostages from Iran
immediately prior to the election of 1980. He believes today that had he made
that decision, he would have won another four years in the White House but will
still prefer the opportunity he had to create the Carter Center over a second
term.
However, is Trump’s bullish rhetoric, larger-than-life persona, excessive
hubris and contempt for his opponents, all underpinned by his $400 billion
estate the only answer the American political system can come up with when the
world is starving for collaborative, collegial, thoughtful, pragmatic,
visionary and sustainable leadership. Stamping out all enemies may have
resonance in North Korea or even in Moscow; it hardly serves the west’s attempt
to stand strong. In fact, ironically, thebully is the weakest and most frightened kid in the school yard, just as
Hitler was the most neurotic figure in the twentieth century by a long shot.

As Churchill reminds us, The Americans will always
do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other options....Let’s hope
his prescience is still relevant....

If we find ourselves
waking up to a Trump presidency in January 2017, we will all have the biggest
and longest-lasting geopolitical headache of the last few centuries.